Roboteer (50 page)

‘What?’ he said.

Rachel glanced nervously at Will’s hands. He looked down. They’d grown into the couch like bits of melted wax. In fact, all along his forearms, threads of organic matter trailed out, plugging him into every data port within reach. Weird bundles of semi-organic fibre had punched through the floor and hooked themselves up to his legs.

He tried to shrug, but apparently his spine was plugged in, too.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Sorry, that looks weird, doesn’t it? I needed bandwidth. Nothing to worry about. I think it’s all retractable. Hopefully.’

He glanced across at Ulanu. The general peered at him with an expression both pained and astonished.

‘General,’ he said.

Ulanu kept staring.

‘Gustav. You’re up.’

‘You still trust him after
all that
?’ said Ira. ‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’

‘Yes,’ said Will. ‘He’s what we’ve got.’

Ulanu ignored the captain and nodded gravely at Will, as if coming to some kind of final peace. He started typing commands into his comms console.

‘Open a channel to the following secure address,’ he said.

Will reached out to touch the Earth’s pervasivenet and made the connection. The ringtone and wait-image they received on the bridge’s monitor screens seemed incongruously mundane, given the circumstances.

Eventually, a worried-looking man with a lined face and dark skin appeared. Will could make out a grand white chamber in the background where men in brightly coloured robes were locked in fierce debate.

‘Khan here,’ the man snapped. ‘This had better be good.’ Then he caught sight of the face on the screen. ‘Gus!’ he exclaimed. ‘Where are you?’

‘I’m aboard the ship that just destroyed our fleet,’ said Gustav.

Khan’s jaw fell open. He was speechless for a second, then spun around to shout at the men behind him. ‘Silence! Ulanu is aboard the intruder. We need order here.’

Several other faces crowded around the monitor as Khan returned his attention to the screen.

‘What’s going on, Gus?’ said Khan. ‘Are you a prisoner?’

‘Listen carefully,’ Ulanu told him. ‘What I have to say may be hard for you to accept, so I’ve assembled an evidence package that I’m sending you on this line. Whatever you think of what I say, you have to hear me out.’

Khan nodded uncertainly.

Ulanu took a deep breath and spoke. ‘This ship is an example of the technology available to an extraterrestrial civilisation called the Transcended. They have joined the war and
sided with the Galateans.
The Transcended have delivered us an ultimatum. Unless the Truist government is dismantled and mankind follows a programme they have laid out, they will take steps to extinguish the entire human race. I repeat:
the entire human race
. I am completely convinced of their sincerity.’

Ulanu paused. Every face Will could see on the screen was transfixed. Some of them bore expressions of horror, others of cynical disbelief, but none of them dared speak.

‘It is the Galateans’ intention to broadcast the truth about the relic and our involvement with it to the entire world,’ said Ulanu. ‘I will not be able to stop them. If we wish to prevent that, we must convince the Prophet to act instead. Oz, you must take the data I’m sending you directly to him. Then, when you’ve both looked at it, get back to me as soon as you can. Use this channel. Do you understand?’

‘I think so,’ said Khan uneasily.

‘Good. I look forward to hearing from you.’ With that, Ulanu cut the line and exhaled.

‘What now?’ said Will.

‘Now we wait,’ replied Ulanu.

The mood on the bridge of the
Ariel Two
was stiff with tension during the minutes that followed. The suntaps came online at last, but by that time Earth’s defensive fleet had converged around them. Thankfully, though, they held their fire.

Will watched through the external sensors as the fleet surrounded the nestship like a closing fist, forming the same spherical configuration as they had at Ceres. Drones and disrupter buoys poured forth from the Earther vessels. Gravity shields took up positions and prepared to charge. This close to the planet, there was little they could achieve without causing wholesale apocalypse on the surface. Maybe the Earthers didn’t care any more.

An hour passed. The shield cooled. Will sat sweating into his couch, his g-ray banks charged and ready, dreading the implications of another encounter. Then, at last, a call came in on Ulanu’s code.

A split-screen image appeared on the monitors, showing two faces Will knew very well. On the left was the man they called the king, the Earth’s nominal secular ruler. He had a round, softly handsome face, but weak, watery eyes.

The man on the right was the opposite – a frail and elderly figure with a wrinkled face and eyes like neutron stars. It was the Prophet, Pyotr Sanchez. Will stared at that face and felt a shiver of loathing. Suddenly it was abundantly clear how a weak old man had managed to hold almost every human world in his grasp. Willpower crackled out of him like inducer discharge.

The king regarded Ulanu with something between confusion and disbelief. The Prophet eyed him with raw hate.

‘General Ulanu,’ said the king.

‘Your Majesty.’

‘We have seen your evidence. It is startling, but as you know, the Kingdom does not bow to threats. You may tell these Transcended—’

Ulanu cut him off. ‘As you will realise if you watched the entire package, your Majesty, the Transcended are interested in neither bargaining nor defiance. The simple presence of this ship in the Earth system is enough to give them access to our sun as a weapon. They will watch our behaviour and annihilate us if they see fit. You have already seen a small demonstration of their capabilities. Most of this was achieved by a
single human pilot
augmented with Transcended technology. I watched that process with my own eyes and I can assure you that we are utterly outmatched. Their ultimatum is not so much a threat as a statement of fact.’

The king’s jaw worked from side to side. He was clearly not used to being talked to like this.

‘I do not care how you choose to define it, Ulanu,’ he said. ‘You imagine that you can come here—’

‘Quiet, Ramon.’ The Prophet’s voice was little more than a whisper but cleaved the air like a gunshot. The king reluctantly fell silent.

‘I
have
watched your entire package, General,’ said the Prophet with a disconcerting smile. ‘It made for amusing viewing. Surely you realise it contains nothing that will sway the people of the Earth? Such an announcement as your Galatean friends propose would be immediately dismissed by the Following as propaganda. For all they know, the funny lights in the sky today were nothing more than fireworks. They are farmers and factory workers, Ulanu. They subsist on a diet of rice and faith. They have no interest in aliens. No understanding of starships.’

Sanchez chuckled to himself at the idea. ‘You talk of statements of fact,’ he said. ‘Let me offer you one of my own.’ He fixed Ulanu with a steely gaze.

Watching through his sensorium, Will felt the weight of those eyes upon him and shivered.

‘The Earth will not change,’ Sanchez purred. ‘You cannot transform the belief system of twelve billion people in a day, or even a lifetime. You cannot stop them from fearing or hating. They will cling to what they know even if their planet stands upon the brink of destruction, as the last hundred years have shown us time and time again. So, if these Transcended intend to destroy mankind, let them try.’

He grinned broadly. ‘If your Galatean friends wish to try to
save us
by imposing a government through force, let them try it. History has plenty of examples of where that leads. Or if your associates think to topple my church by destroying me and my palace, I
welcome
them. They will be doing my job for me.

‘I am an old man, Ulanu. Holding the Kingdom together has been hard. Determining what to do with the church in the aftermath of war was already proving even harder. But killing me would create a martyr who would never die. It would crystallise my followers’ faith and make my words live for ever. So you see, there is little for the Galateans’ ludicrous behemoth to do, except perhaps fulfil the alien threat in advance and scour this world of life. Short of that, the only result they can obtain is to make us hate them.’

His smile vanished. ‘And we already know how to do that. So leave, traitor. And take your laughable warhorse with you.’

Will found himself dismayed. There was an awful kind of truth behind the Prophet’s words. The crusades had never been based on sound reasoning. Had they been fools to imagine that Earth would suddenly come to its senses just because they told it to?

Suddenly, Ulanu spoke. ‘Are you finished, your Honesty?’ he asked in clipped tones. ‘Then permit me to reply. Your prediction regarding the truculence of the Following is enlightening, though it tells me more about your opinion of the people you rule than it does about them. However, it leads me to believe that you have failed to grasp the fundamental purpose of this visit.

‘Let me present you with a simple choice. Option one is that you make a statement to the people of Earth yourself. You bring an end to hostilities immediately, renounce your claim on the colony worlds and withdraw your troops. You also announce the existence of extraterrestrial life, warn humanity of the threat from the Transcended and amend doctrine accordingly. In return for this, Galatea will sign a zero-exploitation contract with Earth. It will also agree to share the sum total of its robotics and genetic technologies with Earth for no cost.

‘Option two is that you choose not to speak. In that case, the Galateans will destroy what is left of the Kingdom fleet. They will blockade aid from the colony worlds and put anti-aircraft sats into Earth orbit.’

Will’s eyes widened in surprise. They’d discussed none of these measures against Earth with the general. He was making it all up himself.

‘After that, we will broadcast the truth and leave for several years,’ Ulanu continued. ‘You may believe your church is solid enough to withstand such a test, your Honesty, but from my observation of it, it is already on the brink of self-destruction. Upon our return, I would not be surprised to find that the Earth has driven itself back into the Stone Age through purposeless squabbling. I doubt there would be much talk of Truism when we offer free food, aid and passage to the colonies for volunteers.’

The Prophet’s expression didn’t change one iota as Ulanu spoke. However, the king’s eyebrows crept up into his hair.

‘You have two hours to make up your mind,’ Ulanu told Sanchez. ‘Failure to communicate will be regarded as tacit selection of option two.’ He stabbed the off key on his keyboard.

Will noticed that the man was shaking. He felt like congratulating the general but knew that nothing he could say would make Ulanu feel any better about what he was doing.

No one spoke for a while after that. Will felt the atmosphere in the
Ariel Two
’s bridge grow intolerably tense. The massive fleet of Earther ships held its position, while other munitions were ferried in from the outer planets.

If the Earthers did decide to fight, the
Ariel Two
would surely not survive another concerted attack in its current condition. His sensor SAPs counted over five thousand antimatter warheads out there. That was enough to crack open a small moon.

Time crawled tortuously by. Ulanu watched them silently like a ghost.

Will’s hope turned to horror as the zero hour slid up to meet them.

‘Guess that’s it, then,’ Ira said heavily. ‘Will, you’d better get back to those g-ray banks. Let’s try to not kill too many civilians as we leave.’

Will swallowed hard and turned his attention to the weapons array. In the solitude of his mental vault, he watched the final seconds count down. He flexed a pair of virtual hands. The nestship tingled in readiness all around him.

Three seconds before the deadline, a call arrived.

‘Hold your fire!’ Ulanu shouted as he hit the button on his console.

On the screen, a single face appeared. It was the king. His cheeks were flushed. A bloody scratch marred his cheek. His hair was in disarray.

‘Galatean Starship
Ariel Two
,’ he said, slightly out of breath. ‘This is King Ramon the First of Earth. The Prophet has been restrained. Please hold your fire and stand by.’

The message ended. Everyone aboard the
Ariel Two
sat in stunned silence. Will looked at Ulanu. Ulanu stared back at him with something between ironic amusement and tragedy showing in his eyes.

‘Did we do it?’ said Rachel. ‘Is that it?’

Will had no idea.

Abruptly, a broadcast message filled the public channels, sending to the entire Earth system. It was the king again.

‘People of Earth!’ he said. The scratch had miraculously disappeared from his cheek and a cloak of gold and blue had been hastily pulled around his shoulders. His hair looked tidier.

‘This is an emergency broadcast. In the last few minutes, the Prophet Sanchez has received a vision from the Lord. To reward us for our victory, the Lord has made shocking new information available to mankind. This information will result in an immediate and glorious change of religious priorities for the Kingdom. Having been taught a lesson, the fifteen colonies will be granted independence by celestial decree, and the Prophet is hereby retiring from office to pursue a new spiritual quest.’

Will didn’t hear the rest because the bridge of the
Ariel Two
erupted in cheering. Rachel sprang out of her couch and grabbed him in her arms, at least so far as his nerve-tendrils would allow. He gingerly pried his arms free of the couch and hugged her back, his fingers trailing moist alien flesh.

‘It’s really over this time, isn’t it?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ Will replied. ‘It’s really over.’